One giant leap in your lovelife too. Soon you won't have to do your wife in person, but use a remote controlled gadget. Slap on some virtual reality goggles too, and you won't see how fat she got, and she won't see how bald you got, since the two of you said 'I do.'
I think therefore I am. You are too. Thank you for your opinion. I'm riding the same wavelength.
Comments: Midwest arid prairie - the US is in one of the best positions against implosion because of this awesome rich soil, and luscious vegetation. Food is the most important thing. I'm more worried about Japan, because there already isn't enough fish in the ocean, for a nation half the population of the US, stuck on such a barren piece of rock. Mexico, Venezuela Middle East, Africa, Brazil, all rainforests, stand to lose a lot more from global warming, while Canadia, Siberia, Argentina tends to gain a lot. Imagine the russians signing the Kyoto treaty - how nuts can Putin get? I guess he's worried that another Napoleon or Hitler won't break their teeth in the cruel Russian Winter that only the indigenous people can stand. Still, imagine the warm, temperate northern Russia the new superpower, Leningrad - oops, St. Petersburg - the most temperate climate, and lake Baikal as the top vacation spot? Imagine Northern Canadia as the new US. Imagine if a climate upset turns the monsoon-Himalaya fed India into the equivalent of Saudi Arabia? Maybe Australia can be turned into a green Argentina too, from desert into rich vegetation, via proper weather pattern maniluplation? Perhaps there is a way to properlty mess with this climate and write India off. The new warfare? How to twist the earth's climate and the wind and ocean currents to blow according to your strategic needs, while your opposition is causing it to blow according to their needs! Wind-war! The Chinese are a bit different than the Indians though, they got everything - luscious grass, high Himalaya mountains in case forests creep higher like in Africa, Gobi-desert, can even run up and invade/unite with siberia/uzkhyrghizistan if pressed. It's a lot harder for the japanese to run upwards and do the same, they'd have to deal with the koreans, and chinese doing the same. I guess you can always resort to throwing smallpox at the chinese, til it sticks, while the japanese will be just held up to high moral standards to do nothing, and whither off. Imagine genetically engineered smallpox, that only attacks persons who were born with incorrect, not officially approved by the World Bank or IMF's list of genes! What a glory for biotech! Heck, we got a nice high spot in Afghanistan, to keep an eye on all this crap, so no worries here. Bush, yer daddy, at the helm of the guns, will protect you with his low-yield nukular non-WMD weapons that can erase masses who dare disagree with a texan.
Ahahaha - Mickey Mouse ever out of copyright? You're dreaming, right? Just think of Disney, and all the jobs lost if they don't stay profitable, and anybody can march around in their own Mickey-Mouse mascot outfit and talk to the children!!! Nah, I think even Santa Claus will get an improvement, and a patent/copyright on that improvement. Disney will own Santa too.
I can already see it, Santa(tm)
Yeah, like the DVD intellectual property folks face huge technological and legal problems these days? Come on, they are the only ones suing, they are not getting sued over not allowing to freely encode, backup, or break region codes in their crap?
You think it's gonna be different with any DRM, that's not even inside winblows, but inside the bios? Why don't we just get rid of the bios altogether, put a simple chip that checks whether you run MS Windows, and if so, then we hand over trust to the OS? It's easier to implement it all in the OS, why must we jump these hoops and pretend?
The only linux that will run is the linux that purchased a patented "trust" license. The fee? A low $399.99, after a $999.99 rebate (that you get back in 8 months), obtained by signing up for a lifetime, unlimited MSN broadband account, for a low introductory rate of $9.99 for 3 months. After the introductory period the then current applicable rate applies (?). A contract cancellation before you die will cost you the remainder of what you would have paid til the rest of your life was over, estimated of your longevity by am MCSE licensed doctor. This doctor's estimate is nondisputable, but in case you succeed disputing it somehow before you get shot like Kennedy in the head, you agree it will not be done in a court, but arbitration-decided in a Redmond, WA jurisdiction of plaintiff's choice.
Oh, by the way, this bios trust license is the only major cost, the Windows OS license will cost you $1.99, or you can run Linux for free, but you still have to buy your patented, nonresellable, nontransferrable and nonnegotiable, fully disclaimed against any kind of responsibility, bios license.
Soon after information is fully locked up, you'll be disallowed to know anything, unless you can show a receipt, payment method for how you obtained that knowledge. Because knowledge is power, knowledge is wealth, and you shouldn't have any for free. There will be anti-terrorist raids, where they catch you not being a complete idiot, but actually knowing something, you'll be automatically jailed. Only properly authorized people will be allowed to know, everyone else mandated to stay imbecile and dumb. A basic license for using the english language, with patented, "revolutionary" grammatical constructions, will cost you a low low 3.99 a month intro rate, for 2 years. Good luck hiring lawyers trying to prove it's prior art, nothing revolutionary about saying "Yo, shizzle muh nizzle," because we gots 10,000 lawyers plus a commando to either eat your single lawyer up in court, or shoot him. By the way, it was illegal to have any money, and not be sunk in a 60 year mortgage over a $799,999.99 2-bedroom, 7 bathroom home at the current prime rate(?)+3.99%, currently owning -649,974.89, and having only 42 years left to repay. Your bank is the only one who can decide how you get to spend your money, if you misbehave, automatic foreclosure on your ass, a bankruptcy stamp on your credit record, barring you from getting any job because of a low credit score. Good luck, starting over, when you have 2 kids to feed, a wife and an ill elder parent to support. Better stick with the system, buddy.
After knowledge is fully locked up, the "authorities" on a mission to protect your security by hunting witches - excuse me, terrorists - will look at other things you consume that are valuable to you - such as water, air/oxygen, and sunshine.
You already get to purchase your bottled water, because it's 'distilled' through reverse osmosis, but it's also fresh from the mountain waterfall picture you see on the bottle (?), and it's got a hint of cherry taste. Unfortunately your public water supplier utility company can no longer provide you with quality water, because it is run by the bankrupt city. Bankrupt, because there isn't enough tax money after letting 150,000 workers go, 200,000 people left without pension whose tab the city must pick up, and all the youth is unemployed, because they are unable to compete with the malaysian child laborers earn
I didn't vote for it. In fact, I didn't even vote for Kerry, like what's the point? I have no way of checking that yes, my vote was counted correctly after I cast it. Trust the gov't approved officials who are out to get themselves reelected? Why don't we just let the Supreme Court decide it all from the start, instead of wasting hundred millions of people's precious time? And let's have the president elected by the Supreme Court nominate people for the Supreme Court. Yeah, foxes running the henhouse.
In any case, the newstainment media decides it all , by what they can and cannot report, not even the voters. The press as private property, in private hands, under the control of a few - what a joke. Dan Rather gets fired - oh, mea culpa, correction, he gets to resign and work on something else, still a puppet of the same corporation.
But even if the media didn't decide, you'd be naive to still believe that voting makes a difference. At a US citizenship ceremony, I heard the judge heartily saying "I know a lot of you come from countries, where, even if there was an election, you only had a single candidate on the ballot."
Yeah, imagine that! Show up at the voting booth, and choose. Choose from the choices given to you. Ahh, you say "what do you mean choose, how can I choose when there is only one candidate to pick from?". Well, easy does it, if that's your problem, we can give you two candidates. Happy now?
Whatever, like voting makes a difference. It gets you fooled into thinking you're in control of your own destiny, not those bullshitting you. The only kind of voting that really counts is when people are willing to risk their own lives enough to collectively march on the street during Vietnam after it personally affected them (no wonder a general draft is not reenacted for Iraq, that'd be an instant fuse to light the whole country into marching,) or boycott buses after Rosa Parks, or show passive resistance to the british army following Gandhi.
Unfortunately when people are comfortable enough, and things don't affect them very personally at the moment, they don't care enough to rise up, cry foul, and protest. Those who do care, come to filtering places like Slashdot and run their mouths, and can be monitored, and surgically eliminated as hotspots ready to ignite something, just at the right moment. Alone we fall, together we stand - well, lets eat up the boyscout spirit too, by telling moms if your son is a boyscout, he gets struck by lightning. Talk about mind control and mass control, that even the Church couldn't achieve in its heyday via mandatory visits to the confession booths.
The 2nd amendment is a very ugly and unfortunate thing to have. It didn't quite make it to be the 1st amendment, but whoever wrote the Constitution really knew what they were up against. The right of the people to be Donald Trump. Guess what? One of the citizenship questions is "have you ever advocated overthrowing a government?" No I haven't (yet), but I fully support the Constitution. Gun-control anyone? Should we abolish the 2nd amendment? Mr. Strawman says: No, remember, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Yeah right. Like a guy with a knife or a spray-can can kill me easier than with a gun? How about more straw man arguments that are easy to refute, so we unknowingly side with the arguments we didn't want to in the first place?
Religion has a very definite function, it fulfills a need for human spirituality. But it always gets into trouble when it wanders into the affairs of science, because science is respectful of nothing. While religion has ultimate truths, dogmas, - such as God exists, God created the Universe - science respects no such things. For instance, we have a scientific truth called the law of conservation of energy. This is a temporary truth, because we are ready to dump it as soon as we find definite proof against its validity. So far it has held up in every experiment, but that doesn't stop us from doubting it, constantly probing it.
Creationism is the wrong focus for religion. Religion should concern itself with human spirituality, with the inner self, forging, mending, strengthening and healing the inner self. Whether the world was created or not, should not matter as far as the inner peace of a person is concerned, because it's something with the external world. It shouldn't matter. A lot of religions get into trouble with trying to explain everything, but the successful ones, among all the mess, have one thing in common: they enable a person, provide him with inner peace and calm. You can have inner peace even in the middle of a fight, even in the middle of a battle. Successful reliogions let a person become much more, much tougher spiritually, than he'd be without his religion. Whether creationism is true or not is way off topic here.
A story I heard from a religion teacher was this: when someone is shot with an arrow, do you stop and wonder what direction the arrow came from, why was it shot, who shot it, what are the consequences of arrows flying, will arrow shooting ever end? Will you deal with all these questions, instead of dropping everything, and helping that person hurt. That is the purpose of religion, not to ask these questions that are off topic, but focus on the target, inner peace, inner health, inner calm. Eastern religions bring this into focus are a lot more clearly than other religions, that wonder off into all kinds of bullshit about how the external world is, what makes it all tick, etc. Leave these questions up to science, science is what deals with the external world, the sensory data, and take care of your own purpose, religion, which is the inner self, where science has no reach, nor business.
Keyboards get dirty, crummy. You can spill food on them, drool on them, get all kinds of stuff into the cracks - hair, dust, bagel-crumbs. Sure you can clean them, but it's easier to just get a new one for 3.99. Now if they only made them recyclable, or made some out of metal parts that come apart easily and you can put them into your dishwasher, then snap back together easily, that would be a lot more green friendly.
As far as outlasting you go, try using a keyboard from 1980 today. Goood luck. Even if it's in perfect condition.
Free software, by definition, is software that's not used to extort money.
But how are you going to reward the creators? How are they going to feed?
This rating system could be one step in the right direction.
Rating could determine donation-worthiness of software - say there was a universal tax levied, or universal donation fund by businesses and foundations, and then the money could distributed by professionals who know where to spend the buck most efficiently, which developpers are about to die of hunger, who are the skinniest of the starving artists.
Feeding intellectuals is important, but motivating them with extra money beyond a certain limit, doesn't work so well. They start to care more about other things. You know, this is how scientists worked in the old days - someone took them into their royal court, gave them a stipend, and told them, go, play, bring me fame. I want to have the best paintings, the most beautiful palaces, and the smartest and most renowned mathematicians in my royal court. Science flourished through open communications and correspondence. These days, if you're not allowed to build on top of what idea I wrote about in my letter, and improve upon it without licensing the intellectual property first, you simply can't 'stand on shoulders of giants', everything stalls and gets locked down. Still, there was reimbursment in the old days too, but this value measurement unit wasn't cold cash, it wasn't money. What was taken as an ethical principle was giving proper credit to the authors, instead of "stealing" their work, or buying them out so you could stick your own name on it. There was a lot of motivation by the scientists to produce and share their achievements with their peers, because of both ego-boost, and because they loved devoting themselves to their 'hobby', or 'passion,' and they really got an intellectual high out of reading their peers' creations, just like you get a high from reading a poem. The feeling of radiant beauty, in your own thoughts, and in the thoughts of others tuned in to the same wavelength can be quite ecstatic. This is how slashdot functions. There is similarly a lot of motivation among free software programmers, for the same reasons.
Unfortunately simple recognition of your accomplishments by your peers isn't able to feed you, and a lot of free software developers end up living in their mother's basements. If there was some kind of fair system of performance measurements, other than the free-market-money-extorting method, maybe there would be a way to properly reward these people, and feed them too at the same time, because what they give to the world is often so much more than what they take. There is a net generation of benefit, but you have to be careful to still properly allocate rewards, otherwise the "they give so much more than they take" could get out of balance. Imagine accounting the cost of food, lodging, and living needs of Isaac Newton, compared to the worth of his output. It just doesn't even make sense to measure it in money, because if he made $10 billion or $15 trillion or whatever Bill Gates makes, it wouldn't have affected his level of production that much. He still needed some basic living needs, but after those were met, passion, love, self satisfaction, and satisfaction from recognition were the much more significant driving forces. Money doesn't function well as a motivator above a certain limit, but creating a debt economy where everyone runs rounds in an infinite hampster-threadmill force to always worry about money, money forced to be a constant incentive, well that's not fair either. There is a need to shake up the US to bring back the age of inventions, the age of Edison, Tesla, Ford, Hall, of 1900, or even the age of Intel from 1960's. Why didn't the US come up with hybrid cars in 2000? Sending a bunch of whip-cracking Donald Trump cowboys shouting "Yeehawww! You're Fired!" on everyone's back isn't gonna inspire creativity. Fear is a powerful motivator, but come on. Professors get tenure, security, not whi
You put too much trust into Big Blue. Unfortunately, their only incentive right now is "anything but fall prey to Microsoft." If Big Blue could be MS themselves, they'd be, in an instant This open source support seems just a defense for them. The motto: Better work for free and give the stuff away, then work for free and be hung out to dry at MS's whim.
Walk through a science grad school department in the US, what do you see? What happened to the people born here? Oh wait, they all went to business school and got MBA's, and they all want to manage the flow of brain-capital that we "import." Why do we have to import? A child born in the US is not dumb, what's wrong with the system that can't output science graduates? Oh, it's too uncool to be a nerd, you get no respect, because intelligence and wisdom is so overrated. The guys who get the respect are the ones who can beat you up and screw you over. Money money money, and carving out your fair share with your teeth and nails is the only admirable way to be, and when you're easily taken, because you give but don't suck too well, you're to be laughed at, because you can't make it on your own. Right now, the emphasis is not on value generation, but on "skill to tap the market." Well, news to you, the market only has so much tappable stuff, if everyone just takes and nobody generates. Blame the ones who give having a dilemma coming here anymore. This "tapping the demand" is run amok. Let's promote even more of this system, let's extend copyright from 70 to 90 years, because that enhances the information generation part? Soon we'll even oxygen and sunshine into property, and you'll have to purchase your fair share from the owners that squatted everything, because, after all, you shouldn't get anything useful for free, including sunshine, oxygen, and information. This "tapping demand" drives everything to the point where human dignity means only as much as its cash-value, as its market value. This "free market" is allowed to get out of hand. Basic necessities, such as illness and death, are used to bankrupt just about anyone who living in a sustained debt society. Try to diverge from it, the powers the be, "the invisible hand", will come down with his full wreath upon you. How dare you undermine the sacred flow of capital? I've personally seen people punished into a miserable job and miserable life, and you can tell their biggest sin was saving, and - oh my God! - buying a house by paying cash, instead of a mortgage. He's crazy! He's crazy! Oh my, how would this economy function without mortgages and payday advance businesses being a norm. Just imagine all the jobs we'd lose! Ugh, everyone suck, nobody create. Where is the balance? (By the way, among the advanced nations, only the US and South Africa doesn't provide a national healthcare as a dignity right, even Canadia has it. Maybe I should have gone to Canada, I don't belong here.) How can you hope for any longterm vision, any kind of long term sustainability? The market shouldn't be everything. For instance, in schools the market doesn't function well, because the rate of return on your investment is too slow - it takes 30 years to properly educate a child, and even then the risk is that they stay dumb and not be geniuses is pretty significant. Talk about wasted investment, money down the drain, improper allocation of resources as far as the market is concerned. How about I put my money into this payday advance business, it generates cash now, within 2 weeks, as soon as payday is here, that's a much more proper way in the "Holy Almighty Market's" eyes.
Consider China in return - when the gov't built a dam to provide electricity, some families protested that they didn't want to move and abandon their homes, because their family has lived in the same house for 800 years. Now that might be quite over the edge, but talk about stability, no wonder they last as a culture. The US that has made it 200 years so far. Talk about mortgages when you lived in a home for 800 years, where are they? Yeah the flow of capital and an economy running in an overdrive doesn't function well in a society and value system that's stable, that only wants what it needs, and knows what it wants - and education first, a future first, stability first. I'm sure even in China these days there are plenty of corrupt, grub first then ethics, live on borrowed cash people, too, they've always been
I agree completely with your story, but there are two sides to everything. I often find myself sliding off deeply nested menus, especially on other people's computers. Trying to click - start, programs, accessories, tools - you may slide off the program menu sideways, and have to start all over by clicking start.
How to rectify this? If I keep the left mouse button held down, then you can restrict my motion. Then when I arrive at the spot, and I let go, jump me over to the submenu, where I click and hold button down again.
Another solution could be where I hold both buttons down at the same time, and then you don't have to "time" a single button. Getting both options could be nice, together with disabling them.
Human beings still care about their own asses, and if they are wise enough to recognize that collaboration is more to their advantage, than factionalism, then there should be peace. Though they say that scientific advancement in past history usually followed the trail of the sword, rather than the plow, you can no longer afford to rely on the sword, when one stroke can eliminate everything. Peace and tolerance is a mandatory thing anymore, if you want anything to survive. So there are two sides to everything, even to hydrogen bombs. Look at the cold war - all two opposing sides could do is just grunt at each other, because a full-out-war would have left no winners. Imagine if in the past, when two armies lined up face to face, a dozen yards from each other, but not be able to do anything other than toss rhetoric at each other, because as soon as they run together, they all automatically die, including their kids, families, cattle, trees back home, and everywhere. Nobody fights wars like that.
Competition and pushing self interest is innate to people, leads to a lot of wars, but the self interest is first, if you recognize nobody wins a war you start, there'd only be losers.
The reason for DC isn switching power supplies is to get the frequency from 50-60Hz of the power line, to 10-20 KHz. You do this by standard oscillators built out of high voltage transistors. Then you do the voltage/ampere conversion via a transformer, at this high frequency.
The reason for this frequency shift is to reduce the size of the transformer. If you look inside any 500W switching power supply, you'll note what a tiny piece of transformer it has - try getting the same wattage out of it at the low frequency, it just can't handle it. There is a magnetic saturation limit for any coil/ferrite core inductor. While you reach this magnetic saturation limit, you get to jerk around, say, 10 electrons based on the laws of induction. Amperes are coulombs/second, basically electrons/second. If you get to jerk more 10 electron bunches around each second, because of higher frequency, and you rectify this alternating current through a diode bridge, you get more amps, more power. Of course the rule is still power in = power out, ratio of voltages is the ratio of turns, ratio of amps is the ratio of turns, but what you do is you increase the maximum capacity limit due to magnetic saturation, so your power in can increase (the cosine phase angle thing comes into play here.)
As far as skin effect goes, I wonder if that's such a big deal at 50-60 Hz, I think the whole conductor is fully used, with the middle carrying say 1% less current density than the skin. But that 1% can add up over miles.
Another big effect is the dielectric constant effects - basically your power lines are heating the ionized water droplets hanging onto them in a rain, just like a microwave heats your food. While your microwave operates at 3 billion Hz, your 60Hz should be minuscule to it, but still, it can add up very much over miles and miles.
The other thing is induced ground currents, in a wet soil. All these things add up compared to DC.
Back in the days of Edison, the biggest gripe with DC was that you could not conduct it at high voltages, and by the time it reached the customer, the voltage drop was excessive, and the amperes melted the wire. (The voltage drop is always a function of amps, dV=IR, R the resistance of the wire - so if you conduct a 120V DC current, and it drops 100 V to 20 V's by the time it reaches the customer, had you conducted it at 50kV's, it would still be 50,000-100 V at your customer, and actually less, because the I would be 500 times smaller.)
That was in a day when there was no technology to easily change DC voltages, but these days, as you point out, there is. However I wonder what the cost of power transistors converting 50 kV's DC to DC is, compared to plain old copper transformers.
In a justice system where whoever comes up with the most money to pay off the judge, or whoever has to greatest influence over the judge, even the courts don't function well. That doesn't mean vigilantism is the answer. The US dealt with the mafia by establishing an FBI, that could police your police for corruption. Maybe Russia needs a brand new KGB, to police their old KGB that converted into the mafia.
...but market research folks gotta love digging through slashdot, where people honestly speak their minds, for free, without having to pay some telemarketer bother them on the phone, and collect the lies.
The consumer can't always vote with his money. Unfortunately, the world isn't perfect, and there are such things as 'natural monopolies', where the cost of establishing a competition is just too enormous for society. For instance, back at the advent of telephone companies, you had, say, 50 competitors in a city, each having to pull their own lines through each neighbourhood, resulting in an ugly zoo of wires, and abandoned wires hanging off poles when a company went bankrupt, and you, as the customer, had to buy 50 telephone sets, one connected to each supplier, and whenever you wanted to contact your customers, you had to know who their phone supplier was. (There were no phone numbers back then, but switchboard operator ladies, which was a standard job for a girl until she got married.) When it comes to electricity, water, sewage, phone, or anything that runs on conduits, you have a natural monopoly, because the cost of pulling 2 or 50 conduit systems through the neighbourhood is just too great, when everyone can already use what's there. The solution so far has been that they are regulated by the government. Now if there were some way to get wireless technology anywhere close in speed to what fiber to the home can provide, you could have full competition, because the costs of competitors erecting 50 antenna poles on top of the hills in your neighborhood is not great. But nothing beats fiber to the home. With electromagnetic signals, or any kind of waves, the higher the datadensity gets, the straighter the path of propagation - i.e. while the low bandwidth longwave radio can penetrate a mountain and oceans to submarines, and FM radio can bend around buildings and trees, but satellite signals can't, they need a somewhat clear line-of-sight (it won't work in an underground garage.) Light simply casts a shadow, it won't go around obstacles at all, like the sound of your voice will bend around the corner or your door to the next room, but ultrasound won't. The path of light in a fiber is straight, it just gets bounced correctly. But it's hard to imagine a wireless system, where you communicate with light or infrared, and whichever way you drive your car, there is a rotating antenna/mirror system to convey your light-signal to a central telephone pole, rotating like a compass according to the path you take. It's just not feasible, for instance, trying to collect and lead out the light signal from underground garages or tunnels, reamplify them, then send them off to the antennas.
They just want to know the locations people are curious about. It's old stuff, the guys in charge studied the pictures enough, they ran out of fun stuff to see, so now they show it to you too, to see what you're looking at, and they will look too, in case you can find something interesting. Especially if you're not looking at your own home, which is easy to figure out, from the phone number/cable account/dsl account that you're connected from.
Still, you can't even verify after the fact that your vote is yes, it's in there, and that the counting was done right. How are you gonna trust the politicians and their assigned representatives to police themselves and count the votes correctly? Can't the government be directly accountable to the people it governs in some way?
Is the 2nd amendment the only way to keep a government in check? (By the way, a citizenship question is "have you ever advocated overthrowing a government". What does the second amendment advocate? No I haven't, but I fully support the constitution:)) I can already see the press is worthless in keeping the government in check, because it can be bought, Dan Rather fired, but how about technology to open and commoditize trust? Public key encryptions are so nice, because you don't have to trust anyone with any of your secrets, nobody owns a master secret database, that you have to contact. It's just pure technology, with no immediately obvious Achilles heel. Yes they may in time solve the mathematics behind it and it will be simple, but for now, it used to be so resilient that even the US gov't came up with export restrictions. Talk about privacy, that even the gov't can't take from you. If you can come up with a public key identity system, where you can verify some part of the identity of the individual, without knowing exactly who they are, that's a perfect anonymity and trust at the same time. If they can pull that off, provide anonymity while ascertaining the identity, and only the part of the identity that's needed, then it will fly. But I don't think that the gov't lookin for terrorists, Microsoft who just bought Gator, that collects personally identifiable information, or all the internet companies who already moan about people deleting their cookies, will help get something like that developed.
If they did, then I could vote from a library computer, a college computer, show up at official voting booths, or if I don't care that much about my anonymity, vote using my own ISP account. But the most important part would be the accountability, where I could download the full voting database, and verify my own vote in it. We don't have anything that comes anywhere close to that, and if we did, it would probably be banned anyway. In the UK the gov't already mandates you reveal your security keys if they ask for them. In any case, such technology could be used not only with voting, but with purchases, and a whole lot of internet things, where you don't need to know who exactly that other user is, you just need to know that you can trust them, and all this, without a 3rd party keeping everyone's info stored somewhere that can be hacked, or abused, such as a Microsoft Passport system. That's all they want, to track everyone's info. If they just release a technology that truly serves the end user, without giving them any kind of control over the user, no way in hell are they gonna work on it. But still, perhaps they could make money on coming up with a pocket encryption device, that takes biometric measurements, uses all kinds of encryption keys, part issued by gov't, part a random number generator, part your biometrics, etc, to generate identity keys on the fly, from which you cannot piece back the original identity, because it's unfeasible technologically, but you can do some math operations against a set, or md5sum or something, where the math will verify if you belong to that set or not. As long as the math is smart enough not to allow to work a smaller set against the data - such as, our guys is in this 100000 person set, let me split it into two, generate md5sums, work the math, and see which of the two 50000 group contains my subject. Wash, rinse, repeat. This should be technologically impossible, where the math fails under a certain threshhold of numerosity, so that you're still ambiguous enough, by the numbers. One such set could be 300 million people, and then if they know you belong to this set, so what. Or as long as the math is targeted to crap out under say 5 billion user
In a sense you have to feel sorry for the people like Andy Fastow, who fell victim to a system that's not perfect. They were just doing their best at what their cultured asked from them, they were pursuing a value system instilled into them, the way everyone else was doing it - coming up with schemes to screw the other guy out of their buck. Plain and simple, what's wrong with that when everybody else is doing it? Why am I picked on for excelling in this? Why is Bill Gates hated/envied for excelling at amassing money? Contrast that to behaviors in past eras, such as a captain man enough to stand at the helm of a sinking ship, because he wants the appreciation of his peers, the look in their eyes, and acting differently would simply invite a horrible look. Principles are often held because of public opinion, culture, not simply because of self control. It's a very powerful feedback mechanism, becaue people are social beings, they care very much about their place in society. The japanese are still heavily dependent on public opinion, on the respect of their peers, even inside money-means-everything companies, and look, they are making better cars! John Stuart Mill, in his essay "On Liberty" wrote about the "tyranny of public opinion," but, like to everything, there is always two sides to every story. Without public opinion you can become "collectively unfit" very very fast. In a sense, you need the tyranny of the public opinion, it's a benefit to you. As in everything, finding the proper balance is the key, and the hard part.
I meant the every respect as in not just the windows part. Listen to the reward system of the unix part - it's not money, not cash, but appreciation of peers. In real life people need money for 2 things - to make a comfortable living and feed themselves and their families, and above that level they need even more money to impress. Money shouldn't be the way to impress, impressing others should be based on character, skill, talent, so that everyone tries to make themselves a better person. I used to tutor math in college, for minimum wage. It was the best use of me, I was the biggest benefit to the world while doing that. I got so tired, but it was a good deed. Yet, over and over, kids came to me, and I just taught them calculus, analytical geometry, and they became fluent, yet all I got in return was a big feeling sorry for me look in their eyes. Why? Because I was making minimum wage. Something is horribly wrong with that. Where I came from, I had a math professor, who didn't live lavishly, he lived very simply. He was past 70, yet everytime he said it's time to retire, he couldn't. You know why? Because the parents went and pleaded with him not to, to teach just one more class, just one more year. What else could he do? Even when he could feel his old age, senility and forgetting stuff, he was still there, teaching, and getting a lot of respect. I can't even start to begin to describe what a benefit it was him teaching me, compared to, say, my biology professor. This math professor was a very happy man, even without lots of money.
When the most impressive people in the world are the ones coming up with the biggest schemes to screw the other guy out of their buck, where is the value generation part, instead of the destruction part? By the way, in the days of true scientific advances, appreciation of peers was the major intellectual cash. Professors could go to a conference and freely talk, and if someone asked for a sample and wanted to collaborate on a topic, you didn't have to send them to the college's legal department, to sign a waiver that anything he ever discovers becomes the IP of the other university, inluding derivative works, so forth and herewith, and he's not allowed to disclose his achievements. Yeah, talk about turning intellectual creations into property in order to boost their creation - just look at unix code vs. windows code. I think the original poster was very right on every remark. When will windows coders not be pressed by a deadline, and instead be allowed to be like artists creating a sculpture, for years if that's what it takes, as long as it can shine and stand the test of time for quality, like the Mona Lisa can? Money, and making a living are very important, but past a certain point, money doesn't function well as an incentive, unless you pervert it into an incentive.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know it's broke? I guess slasdhot is becoming just a bit too much of a nuisance to the powers that be.
Yeah, WTF? Slashdot system showing signs of cracking, this guy and his gang bastardizing it all.
One giant leap in your lovelife too. Soon you won't have to do your wife in person, but use a remote controlled gadget. Slap on some virtual reality goggles too, and you won't see how fat she got, and she won't see how bald you got, since the two of you said 'I do.'
I think therefore I am. You are too. Thank you for your opinion. I'm riding the same wavelength.
Comments:
Midwest arid prairie - the US is in one of the best positions against implosion because of this awesome rich soil, and luscious vegetation. Food is the most important thing. I'm more worried about Japan, because there already isn't enough fish in the ocean, for a nation half the population of the US, stuck on such a barren piece of rock. Mexico, Venezuela Middle East, Africa, Brazil, all rainforests, stand to lose a lot more from global warming, while Canadia, Siberia, Argentina tends to gain a lot. Imagine the russians signing the Kyoto treaty - how nuts can Putin get? I guess he's worried that another Napoleon or Hitler won't break their teeth in the cruel Russian Winter that only the indigenous people can stand. Still, imagine the warm, temperate northern Russia the new superpower, Leningrad - oops, St. Petersburg - the most temperate climate, and lake Baikal as the top vacation spot? Imagine Northern Canadia as the new US. Imagine if a climate upset turns the monsoon-Himalaya fed India into the equivalent of Saudi Arabia? Maybe Australia can be turned into a green Argentina too, from desert into rich vegetation, via proper weather pattern maniluplation? Perhaps there is a way to properlty mess with this climate and write India off. The new warfare? How to twist the earth's climate and the wind and ocean currents to blow according to your strategic needs, while your opposition is causing it to blow according to their needs! Wind-war!
The Chinese are a bit different than the Indians though, they got everything - luscious grass, high Himalaya mountains in case forests creep higher like in Africa, Gobi-desert, can even run up and invade/unite with siberia/uzkhyrghizistan if pressed. It's a lot harder for the japanese to run upwards and do the same, they'd have to deal with the koreans, and chinese doing the same. I guess you can always resort to throwing smallpox at the chinese, til it sticks, while the japanese will be just held up to high moral standards to do nothing, and whither off. Imagine genetically engineered smallpox, that only attacks persons who were born with incorrect, not officially approved by the World Bank or IMF's list of genes! What a glory for biotech!
Heck, we got a nice high spot in Afghanistan, to keep an eye on all this crap, so no worries here. Bush, yer daddy, at the helm of the guns, will protect you with his low-yield nukular non-WMD weapons that can erase masses who dare disagree with a texan.
Ahahaha - Mickey Mouse ever out of copyright? You're dreaming, right? Just think of Disney, and all the jobs lost if they don't stay profitable, and anybody can march around in their own Mickey-Mouse mascot outfit and talk to the children!!! Nah, I think even Santa Claus will get an improvement, and a patent/copyright on that improvement. Disney will own Santa too.
I can already see it, Santa(tm)
Yeah, like the DVD intellectual property folks face huge technological and legal problems these days? Come on, they are the only ones suing, they are not getting sued over not allowing to freely encode, backup, or break region codes in their crap?
You think it's gonna be different with any DRM, that's not even inside winblows, but inside the bios? Why don't we just get rid of the bios altogether, put a simple chip that checks whether you run MS Windows, and if so, then we hand over trust to the OS? It's easier to implement it all in the OS, why must we jump these hoops and pretend?
The only linux that will run is the linux that purchased a patented "trust" license. The fee? A low $399.99, after a $999.99 rebate (that you get back in 8 months), obtained by signing up for a lifetime, unlimited MSN broadband account, for a low introductory rate of $9.99 for 3 months. After the introductory period the then current applicable rate applies (?). A contract cancellation before you die will cost you the remainder of what you would have paid til the rest of your life was over, estimated of your longevity by am MCSE licensed doctor. This doctor's estimate is nondisputable, but in case you succeed disputing it somehow before you get shot like Kennedy in the head, you agree it will not be done in a court, but arbitration-decided in a Redmond, WA jurisdiction of plaintiff's choice.
Oh, by the way, this bios trust license is the only major cost, the Windows OS license will cost you $1.99, or you can run Linux for free, but you still have to buy your patented, nonresellable, nontransferrable and nonnegotiable, fully disclaimed against any kind of responsibility, bios license.
Soon after information is fully locked up, you'll be disallowed to know anything, unless you can show a receipt, payment method for how you obtained that knowledge. Because knowledge is power, knowledge is wealth, and you shouldn't have any for free. There will be anti-terrorist raids, where they catch you not being a complete idiot, but actually knowing something, you'll be automatically jailed. Only properly authorized people will be allowed to know, everyone else mandated to stay imbecile and dumb. A basic license for using the english language, with patented, "revolutionary" grammatical constructions, will cost you a low low 3.99 a month intro rate, for 2 years. Good luck hiring lawyers trying to prove it's prior art, nothing revolutionary about saying "Yo, shizzle muh nizzle," because we gots 10,000 lawyers plus a commando to either eat your single lawyer up in court, or shoot him. By the way, it was illegal to have any money, and not be sunk in a 60 year mortgage over a $799,999.99 2-bedroom, 7 bathroom home at the current prime rate(?)+3.99%, currently owning -649,974.89, and having only 42 years left to repay. Your bank is the only one who can decide how you get to spend your money, if you misbehave, automatic foreclosure on your ass, a bankruptcy stamp on your credit record, barring you from getting any job because of a low credit score. Good luck, starting over, when you have 2 kids to feed, a wife and an ill elder parent to support. Better stick with the system, buddy.
After knowledge is fully locked up, the "authorities" on a mission to protect your security by hunting witches - excuse me, terrorists - will look at other things you consume that are valuable to you - such as water, air/oxygen, and sunshine.
You already get to purchase your bottled water, because it's 'distilled' through reverse osmosis, but it's also fresh from the mountain waterfall picture you see on the bottle (?), and it's got a hint of cherry taste. Unfortunately your public water supplier utility company can no longer provide you with quality water, because it is run by the bankrupt city. Bankrupt, because there isn't enough tax money after letting 150,000 workers go, 200,000 people left without pension whose tab the city must pick up, and all the youth is unemployed, because they are unable to compete with the malaysian child laborers earn
"Remember: YOU VOTED FOR IT."
I didn't vote for it. In fact, I didn't even vote for Kerry, like what's the point? I have no way of checking that yes, my vote was counted correctly after I cast it. Trust the gov't approved officials who are out to get themselves reelected? Why don't we just let the Supreme Court decide it all from the start, instead of wasting hundred millions of people's precious time? And let's have the president elected by the Supreme Court nominate people for the Supreme Court. Yeah, foxes running the henhouse.
In any case, the newstainment media decides it all , by what they can and cannot report, not even the voters. The press as private property, in private hands, under the control of a few - what a joke. Dan Rather gets fired - oh, mea culpa, correction, he gets to resign and work on something else, still a puppet of the same corporation.
But even if the media didn't decide, you'd be naive to still believe that voting makes a difference. At a US citizenship ceremony, I heard the judge heartily saying "I know a lot of you come from countries, where, even if there was an election, you only had a single candidate on the ballot."
Yeah, imagine that! Show up at the voting booth, and choose. Choose from the choices given to you. Ahh, you say "what do you mean choose, how can I choose when there is only one candidate to pick from?". Well, easy does it, if that's your problem, we can give you two candidates. Happy now?
Whatever, like voting makes a difference. It gets you fooled into thinking you're in control of your own destiny, not those bullshitting you. The only kind of voting that really counts is when people are willing to risk their own lives enough to collectively march on the street during Vietnam after it personally affected them (no wonder a general draft is not reenacted for Iraq, that'd be an instant fuse to light the whole country into marching,) or boycott buses after Rosa Parks, or show passive resistance to the british army following Gandhi.
Unfortunately when people are comfortable enough, and things don't affect them very personally at the moment, they don't care enough to rise up, cry foul, and protest. Those who do care, come to filtering places like Slashdot and run their mouths, and can be monitored, and surgically eliminated as hotspots ready to ignite something, just at the right moment. Alone we fall, together we stand - well, lets eat up the boyscout spirit too, by telling moms if your son is a boyscout, he gets struck by lightning. Talk about mind control and mass control, that even the Church couldn't achieve in its heyday via mandatory visits to the confession booths.
The 2nd amendment is a very ugly and unfortunate thing to have. It didn't quite make it to be the 1st amendment, but whoever wrote the Constitution really knew what they were up against. The right of the people to be Donald Trump. Guess what? One of the citizenship questions is "have you ever advocated overthrowing a government?" No I haven't (yet), but I fully support the Constitution. Gun-control anyone? Should we abolish the 2nd amendment? Mr. Strawman says: No, remember, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Yeah right. Like a guy with a knife or a spray-can can kill me easier than with a gun? How about more straw man arguments that are easy to refute, so we unknowingly side with the arguments we didn't want to in the first place?
That's how horses, elephants, and people break in - they get harassed long enough.
Religion has a very definite function, it fulfills a need for human spirituality. But it always gets into trouble when it wanders into the affairs of science, because science is respectful of nothing. While religion has ultimate truths, dogmas, - such as God exists, God created the Universe - science respects no such things. For instance, we have a scientific truth called the law of conservation of energy. This is a temporary truth, because we are ready to dump it as soon as we find definite proof against its validity. So far it has held up in every experiment, but that doesn't stop us from doubting it, constantly probing it.
Creationism is the wrong focus for religion. Religion should concern itself with human spirituality, with the inner self, forging, mending, strengthening and healing the inner self. Whether the world was created or not, should not matter as far as the inner peace of a person is concerned, because it's something with the external world. It shouldn't matter. A lot of religions get into trouble with trying to explain everything, but the successful ones, among all the mess, have one thing in common: they enable a person, provide him with inner peace and calm. You can have inner peace even in the middle of a fight, even in the middle of a battle. Successful reliogions let a person become much more, much tougher spiritually, than he'd be without his religion. Whether creationism is true or not is way off topic here.
A story I heard from a religion teacher was this: when someone is shot with an arrow, do you stop and wonder what direction the arrow came from, why was it shot, who shot it, what are the consequences of arrows flying, will arrow shooting ever end? Will you deal with all these questions, instead of dropping everything, and helping that person hurt. That is the purpose of religion, not to ask these questions that are off topic, but focus on the target, inner peace, inner health, inner calm. Eastern religions bring this into focus are a lot more clearly than other religions, that wonder off into all kinds of bullshit about how the external world is, what makes it all tick, etc. Leave these questions up to science, science is what deals with the external world, the sensory data, and take care of your own purpose, religion, which is the inner self, where science has no reach, nor business.
Keyboards get dirty, crummy. You can spill food on them, drool on them, get all kinds of stuff into the cracks - hair, dust, bagel-crumbs. Sure you can clean them, but it's easier to just get a new one for 3.99. Now if they only made them recyclable, or made some out of metal parts that come apart easily and you can put them into your dishwasher, then snap back together easily, that would be a lot more green friendly. As far as outlasting you go, try using a keyboard from 1980 today. Goood luck. Even if it's in perfect condition.
Free software, by definition, is software that's not used to extort money.
But how are you going to reward the creators? How are they going to feed?
This rating system could be one step in the right direction.
Rating could determine donation-worthiness of software - say there was a universal tax levied, or universal donation fund by businesses and foundations, and then the money could distributed by professionals who know where to spend the buck most efficiently, which developpers are about to die of hunger, who are the skinniest of the starving artists.
Feeding intellectuals is important, but motivating them with extra money beyond a certain limit, doesn't work so well. They start to care more about other things. You know, this is how scientists worked in the old days - someone took them into their royal court, gave them a stipend, and told them, go, play, bring me fame. I want to have the best paintings, the most beautiful palaces, and the smartest and most renowned mathematicians in my royal court. Science flourished through open communications and correspondence. These days, if you're not allowed to build on top of what idea I wrote about in my letter, and improve upon it without licensing the intellectual property first, you simply can't 'stand on shoulders of giants', everything stalls and gets locked down. Still, there was reimbursment in the old days too, but this value measurement unit wasn't cold cash, it wasn't money. What was taken as an ethical principle was giving proper credit to the authors, instead of "stealing" their work, or buying them out so you could stick your own name on it. There was a lot of motivation by the scientists to produce and share their achievements with their peers, because of both ego-boost, and because they loved devoting themselves to their 'hobby', or 'passion,' and they really got an intellectual high out of reading their peers' creations, just like you get a high from reading a poem. The feeling of radiant beauty, in your own thoughts, and in the thoughts of others tuned in to the same wavelength can be quite ecstatic. This is how slashdot functions. There is similarly a lot of motivation among free software programmers, for the same reasons.
Unfortunately simple recognition of your accomplishments by your peers isn't able to feed you, and a lot of free software developers end up living in their mother's basements. If there was some kind of fair system of performance measurements, other than the free-market-money-extorting method, maybe there would be a way to properly reward these people, and feed them too at the same time, because what they give to the world is often so much more than what they take. There is a net generation of benefit, but you have to be careful to still properly allocate rewards, otherwise the "they give so much more than they take" could get out of balance. Imagine accounting the cost of food, lodging, and living needs of Isaac Newton, compared to the worth of his output. It just doesn't even make sense to measure it in money, because if he made $10 billion or $15 trillion or whatever Bill Gates makes, it wouldn't have affected his level of production that much. He still needed some basic living needs, but after those were met, passion, love, self satisfaction, and satisfaction from recognition were the much more significant driving forces. Money doesn't function well as a motivator above a certain limit, but creating a debt economy where everyone runs rounds in an infinite hampster-threadmill force to always worry about money, money forced to be a constant incentive, well that's not fair either. There is a need to shake up the US to bring back the age of inventions, the age of Edison, Tesla, Ford, Hall, of 1900, or even the age of Intel from 1960's. Why didn't the US come up with hybrid cars in 2000? Sending a bunch of whip-cracking Donald Trump cowboys shouting "Yeehawww! You're Fired!" on everyone's back isn't gonna inspire creativity. Fear is a powerful motivator, but come on. Professors get tenure, security, not whi
You put too much trust into Big Blue. Unfortunately, their only incentive right now is "anything but fall prey to Microsoft." If Big Blue could be MS themselves, they'd be, in an instant This open source support seems just a defense for them. The motto: Better work for free and give the stuff away, then work for free and be hung out to dry at MS's whim.
Walk through a science grad school department in the US, what do you see? What happened to the people born here? Oh wait, they all went to business school and got MBA's, and they all want to manage the flow of brain-capital that we "import." Why do we have to import? A child born in the US is not dumb, what's wrong with the system that can't output science graduates? Oh, it's too uncool to be a nerd, you get no respect, because intelligence and wisdom is so overrated. The guys who get the respect are the ones who can beat you up and screw you over. Money money money, and carving out your fair share with your teeth and nails is the only admirable way to be, and when you're easily taken, because you give but don't suck too well, you're to be laughed at, because you can't make it on your own.
Right now, the emphasis is not on value generation, but on "skill to tap the market." Well, news to you, the market only has so much tappable stuff, if everyone just takes and nobody generates. Blame the ones who give having a dilemma coming here anymore. This "tapping the demand" is run amok. Let's promote even more of this system, let's extend copyright from 70 to 90 years, because that enhances the information generation part? Soon we'll even oxygen and sunshine into property, and you'll have to purchase your fair share from the owners that squatted everything, because, after all, you shouldn't get anything useful for free, including sunshine, oxygen, and information. This "tapping demand" drives everything to the point where human dignity means only as much as its cash-value, as its market value. This "free market" is allowed to get out of hand. Basic necessities, such as illness and death, are used to bankrupt just about anyone who living in a sustained debt society. Try to diverge from it, the powers the be, "the invisible hand", will come down with his full wreath upon you. How dare you undermine the sacred flow of capital? I've personally seen people punished into a miserable job and miserable life, and you can tell their biggest sin was saving, and - oh my God! - buying a house by paying cash, instead of a mortgage. He's crazy! He's crazy! Oh my, how would this economy function without mortgages and payday advance businesses being a norm. Just imagine all the jobs we'd lose! Ugh, everyone suck, nobody create. Where is the balance? (By the way, among the advanced nations, only the US and South Africa doesn't provide a national healthcare as a dignity right, even Canadia has it. Maybe I should have gone to Canada, I don't belong here.)
How can you hope for any longterm vision, any kind of long term sustainability? The market shouldn't be everything. For instance, in schools the market doesn't function well, because the rate of return on your investment is too slow - it takes 30 years to properly educate a child, and even then the risk is that they stay dumb and not be geniuses is pretty significant. Talk about wasted investment, money down the drain, improper allocation of resources as far as the market is concerned. How about I put my money into this payday advance business, it generates cash now, within 2 weeks, as soon as payday is here, that's a much more proper way in the "Holy Almighty Market's" eyes.
Consider China in return - when the gov't built a dam to provide electricity, some families protested that they didn't want to move and abandon their homes, because their family has lived in the same house for 800 years. Now that might be quite over the edge, but talk about stability, no wonder they last as a culture. The US that has made it 200 years so far. Talk about mortgages when you lived in a home for 800 years, where are they? Yeah the flow of capital and an economy running in an overdrive doesn't function well in a society and value system that's stable, that only wants what it needs, and knows what it wants - and education first, a future first, stability first. I'm sure even in China these days there are plenty of corrupt, grub first then ethics, live on borrowed cash people, too, they've always been
Don't I wish I was born in China, and never came to the US?
I agree completely with your story, but there are two sides to everything. I often find myself sliding off deeply nested menus, especially on other people's computers. Trying to click - start, programs, accessories, tools - you may slide off the program menu sideways, and have to start all over by clicking start.
How to rectify this? If I keep the left mouse button held down, then you can restrict my motion. Then when I arrive at the spot, and I let go, jump me over to the submenu, where I click and hold button down again.
Another solution could be where I hold both buttons down at the same time, and then you don't have to "time" a single button. Getting both options could be nice, together with disabling them.
Human beings still care about their own asses, and if they are wise enough to recognize that collaboration is more to their advantage, than factionalism, then there should be peace. Though they say that scientific advancement in past history usually followed the trail of the sword, rather than the plow, you can no longer afford to rely on the sword, when one stroke can eliminate everything. Peace and tolerance is a mandatory thing anymore, if you want anything to survive. So there are two sides to everything, even to hydrogen bombs. Look at the cold war - all two opposing sides could do is just grunt at each other, because a full-out-war would have left no winners. Imagine if in the past, when two armies lined up face to face, a dozen yards from each other, but not be able to do anything other than toss rhetoric at each other, because as soon as they run together, they all automatically die, including their kids, families, cattle, trees back home, and everywhere. Nobody fights wars like that. Competition and pushing self interest is innate to people, leads to a lot of wars, but the self interest is first, if you recognize nobody wins a war you start, there'd only be losers.
The reason for DC isn switching power supplies is to get the frequency from 50-60Hz of the power line, to 10-20 KHz. You do this by standard oscillators built out of high voltage transistors. Then you do the voltage/ampere conversion via a transformer, at this high frequency. The reason for this frequency shift is to reduce the size of the transformer. If you look inside any 500W switching power supply, you'll note what a tiny piece of transformer it has - try getting the same wattage out of it at the low frequency, it just can't handle it. There is a magnetic saturation limit for any coil/ferrite core inductor. While you reach this magnetic saturation limit, you get to jerk around, say, 10 electrons based on the laws of induction. Amperes are coulombs/second, basically electrons/second. If you get to jerk more 10 electron bunches around each second, because of higher frequency, and you rectify this alternating current through a diode bridge, you get more amps, more power. Of course the rule is still power in = power out, ratio of voltages is the ratio of turns, ratio of amps is the ratio of turns, but what you do is you increase the maximum capacity limit due to magnetic saturation, so your power in can increase (the cosine phase angle thing comes into play here.) As far as skin effect goes, I wonder if that's such a big deal at 50-60 Hz, I think the whole conductor is fully used, with the middle carrying say 1% less current density than the skin. But that 1% can add up over miles. Another big effect is the dielectric constant effects - basically your power lines are heating the ionized water droplets hanging onto them in a rain, just like a microwave heats your food. While your microwave operates at 3 billion Hz, your 60Hz should be minuscule to it, but still, it can add up very much over miles and miles. The other thing is induced ground currents, in a wet soil. All these things add up compared to DC. Back in the days of Edison, the biggest gripe with DC was that you could not conduct it at high voltages, and by the time it reached the customer, the voltage drop was excessive, and the amperes melted the wire. (The voltage drop is always a function of amps, dV=IR, R the resistance of the wire - so if you conduct a 120V DC current, and it drops 100 V to 20 V's by the time it reaches the customer, had you conducted it at 50kV's, it would still be 50,000-100 V at your customer, and actually less, because the I would be 500 times smaller.) That was in a day when there was no technology to easily change DC voltages, but these days, as you point out, there is. However I wonder what the cost of power transistors converting 50 kV's DC to DC is, compared to plain old copper transformers.
In a justice system where whoever comes up with the most money to pay off the judge, or whoever has to greatest influence over the judge, even the courts don't function well. That doesn't mean vigilantism is the answer. The US dealt with the mafia by establishing an FBI, that could police your police for corruption. Maybe Russia needs a brand new KGB, to police their old KGB that converted into the mafia.
...but market research folks gotta love digging through slashdot, where people honestly speak their minds, for free, without having to pay some telemarketer bother them on the phone, and collect the lies.
Can't somebody please mirror it for them, or can't they go through some anonymous access proxy?
The consumer can't always vote with his money. Unfortunately, the world isn't perfect, and there are such things as 'natural monopolies', where the cost of establishing a competition is just too enormous for society. For instance, back at the advent of telephone companies, you had, say, 50 competitors in a city, each having to pull their own lines through each neighbourhood, resulting in an ugly zoo of wires, and abandoned wires hanging off poles when a company went bankrupt, and you, as the customer, had to buy 50 telephone sets, one connected to each supplier, and whenever you wanted to contact your customers, you had to know who their phone supplier was. (There were no phone numbers back then, but switchboard operator ladies, which was a standard job for a girl until she got married.) When it comes to electricity, water, sewage, phone, or anything that runs on conduits, you have a natural monopoly, because the cost of pulling 2 or 50 conduit systems through the neighbourhood is just too great, when everyone can already use what's there. The solution so far has been that they are regulated by the government. Now if there were some way to get wireless technology anywhere close in speed to what fiber to the home can provide, you could have full competition, because the costs of competitors erecting 50 antenna poles on top of the hills in your neighborhood is not great. But nothing beats fiber to the home. With electromagnetic signals, or any kind of waves, the higher the datadensity gets, the straighter the path of propagation - i.e. while the low bandwidth longwave radio can penetrate a mountain and oceans to submarines, and FM radio can bend around buildings and trees, but satellite signals can't, they need a somewhat clear line-of-sight (it won't work in an underground garage.) Light simply casts a shadow, it won't go around obstacles at all, like the sound of your voice will bend around the corner or your door to the next room, but ultrasound won't. The path of light in a fiber is straight, it just gets bounced correctly. But it's hard to imagine a wireless system, where you communicate with light or infrared, and whichever way you drive your car, there is a rotating antenna/mirror system to convey your light-signal to a central telephone pole, rotating like a compass according to the path you take. It's just not feasible, for instance, trying to collect and lead out the light signal from underground garages or tunnels, reamplify them, then send them off to the antennas.
They just want to know the locations people are curious about. It's old stuff, the guys in charge studied the pictures enough, they ran out of fun stuff to see, so now they show it to you too, to see what you're looking at, and they will look too, in case you can find something interesting. Especially if you're not looking at your own home, which is easy to figure out, from the phone number/cable account/dsl account that you're connected from.
Still, you can't even verify after the fact that your vote is yes, it's in there, and that the counting was done right. How are you gonna trust the politicians and their assigned representatives to police themselves and count the votes correctly? Can't the government be directly accountable to the people it governs in some way? Is the 2nd amendment the only way to keep a government in check? (By the way, a citizenship question is "have you ever advocated overthrowing a government". What does the second amendment advocate? No I haven't, but I fully support the constitution :)) I can already see the press is worthless in keeping the government in check, because it can be bought, Dan Rather fired, but how about technology to open and commoditize trust? Public key encryptions are so nice, because you don't have to trust anyone with any of your secrets, nobody owns a master secret database, that you have to contact. It's just pure technology, with no immediately obvious Achilles heel. Yes they may in time solve the mathematics behind it and it will be simple, but for now, it used to be so resilient that even the US gov't came up with export restrictions. Talk about privacy, that even the gov't can't take from you. If you can come up with a public key identity system, where you can verify some part of the identity of the individual, without knowing exactly who they are, that's a perfect anonymity and trust at the same time. If they can pull that off, provide anonymity while ascertaining the identity, and only the part of the identity that's needed, then it will fly. But I don't think that the gov't lookin for terrorists, Microsoft who just bought Gator, that collects personally identifiable information, or all the internet companies who already moan about people deleting their cookies, will help get something like that developed.
If they did, then I could vote from a library computer, a college computer, show up at official voting booths, or if I don't care that much about my anonymity, vote using my own ISP account. But the most important part would be the accountability, where I could download the full voting database, and verify my own vote in it. We don't have anything that comes anywhere close to that, and if we did, it would probably be banned anyway. In the UK the gov't already mandates you reveal your security keys if they ask for them. In any case, such technology could be used not only with voting, but with purchases, and a whole lot of internet things, where you don't need to know who exactly that other user is, you just need to know that you can trust them, and all this, without a 3rd party keeping everyone's info stored somewhere that can be hacked, or abused, such as a Microsoft Passport system. That's all they want, to track everyone's info. If they just release a technology that truly serves the end user, without giving them any kind of control over the user, no way in hell are they gonna work on it. But still, perhaps they could make money on coming up with a pocket encryption device, that takes biometric measurements, uses all kinds of encryption keys, part issued by gov't, part a random number generator, part your biometrics, etc, to generate identity keys on the fly, from which you cannot piece back the original identity, because it's unfeasible technologically, but you can do some math operations against a set, or md5sum or something, where the math will verify if you belong to that set or not. As long as the math is smart enough not to allow to work a smaller set against the data - such as, our guys is in this 100000 person set, let me split it into two, generate md5sums, work the math, and see which of the two 50000 group contains my subject. Wash, rinse, repeat. This should be technologically impossible, where the math fails under a certain threshhold of numerosity, so that you're still ambiguous enough, by the numbers. One such set could be 300 million people, and then if they know you belong to this set, so what. Or as long as the math is targeted to crap out under say 5 billion user
In a sense you have to feel sorry for the people like Andy Fastow, who fell victim to a system that's not perfect. They were just doing their best at what their cultured asked from them, they were pursuing a value system instilled into them, the way everyone else was doing it - coming up with schemes to screw the other guy out of their buck. Plain and simple, what's wrong with that when everybody else is doing it? Why am I picked on for excelling in this? Why is Bill Gates hated/envied for excelling at amassing money? Contrast that to behaviors in past eras, such as a captain man enough to stand at the helm of a sinking ship, because he wants the appreciation of his peers, the look in their eyes, and acting differently would simply invite a horrible look. Principles are often held because of public opinion, culture, not simply because of self control. It's a very powerful feedback mechanism, becaue people are social beings, they care very much about their place in society. The japanese are still heavily dependent on public opinion, on the respect of their peers, even inside money-means-everything companies, and look, they are making better cars! John Stuart Mill, in his essay "On Liberty" wrote about the "tyranny of public opinion," but, like to everything, there is always two sides to every story. Without public opinion you can become "collectively unfit" very very fast. In a sense, you need the tyranny of the public opinion, it's a benefit to you. As in everything, finding the proper balance is the key, and the hard part.
I meant the every respect as in not just the windows part. Listen to the reward system of the unix part - it's not money, not cash, but appreciation of peers. In real life people need money for 2 things - to make a comfortable living and feed themselves and their families, and above that level they need even more money to impress. Money shouldn't be the way to impress, impressing others should be based on character, skill, talent, so that everyone tries to make themselves a better person. I used to tutor math in college, for minimum wage. It was the best use of me, I was the biggest benefit to the world while doing that. I got so tired, but it was a good deed. Yet, over and over, kids came to me, and I just taught them calculus, analytical geometry, and they became fluent, yet all I got in return was a big feeling sorry for me look in their eyes. Why? Because I was making minimum wage. Something is horribly wrong with that. Where I came from, I had a math professor, who didn't live lavishly, he lived very simply. He was past 70, yet everytime he said it's time to retire, he couldn't. You know why? Because the parents went and pleaded with him not to, to teach just one more class, just one more year. What else could he do? Even when he could feel his old age, senility and forgetting stuff, he was still there, teaching, and getting a lot of respect. I can't even start to begin to describe what a benefit it was him teaching me, compared to, say, my biology professor. This math professor was a very happy man, even without lots of money. When the most impressive people in the world are the ones coming up with the biggest schemes to screw the other guy out of their buck, where is the value generation part, instead of the destruction part? By the way, in the days of true scientific advances, appreciation of peers was the major intellectual cash. Professors could go to a conference and freely talk, and if someone asked for a sample and wanted to collaborate on a topic, you didn't have to send them to the college's legal department, to sign a waiver that anything he ever discovers becomes the IP of the other university, inluding derivative works, so forth and herewith, and he's not allowed to disclose his achievements. Yeah, talk about turning intellectual creations into property in order to boost their creation - just look at unix code vs. windows code. I think the original poster was very right on every remark. When will windows coders not be pressed by a deadline, and instead be allowed to be like artists creating a sculpture, for years if that's what it takes, as long as it can shine and stand the test of time for quality, like the Mona Lisa can? Money, and making a living are very important, but past a certain point, money doesn't function well as an incentive, unless you pervert it into an incentive.
hehehe... beauty of unix and C...